Clarisse Thorn

I write and speak about subcultures, sexuality, and new media.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me a question about something BDSM-related that I feel “done with”; I feel like I did all my thinking about those topics, years ago. But it’s still useful to get those questions today, because it forces me to try and understand where my head was at, three to seven years ago. It forces me to calibrate my inner processes. I often think of these questions as the “simple” ones, or the “101” questions, because they are so often addressed in typical conversation among BDSMers. Then again, lots of people don’t have access to a BDSM community, or aren’t interested in their local BDSM community for whatever reason. Therefore, it’s useful for me to cover those “simple” questions on my blog anyway.

Plus, just because a question is simple doesn’t mean the question is not interesting.

One such question is the “BDSM versus sex” question. Is BDSM always sex? Is it always sexual? A lot of people see BDSM as something that “always” includes sex, or is “always sexual in some way”. In the documentary “BDSM: It’s Not What You Think!“, one famous BDSM writer is quoted saying something like: “I would say that eros is always involved in BDSM, even if the participants aren’t doing anything that would look sexual to non-BDSMers.”

But a lot of other people see BDSM, and the BDSM urge, as something that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex — that is separate from sex.

I see two sides to this question: the political side, and the “how does it feel?” side. Both sides are intertwined; when it comes to sex, politics can’t help shaping our experiences (and vice versa). I acknowledge this. And yet even when I try to account for that, there is still something deeply different about the way my body feels my BDSM urges, as opposed to how my body feels sexual urges. I don’t think that those bodily differences could ever quite go away, no matter how my mental angle on those processes changed.

Although Part 1 was all about how the divide between “BDSM” and “sex” is often nonsensical, or purely political, or socially constructed … that doesn’t mean that the divide does not exist. I once had a conversation about ignoring social constructs with a wise friend, who noted dryly that: “One-way streets are a social construct. That doesn’t mean we should ignore them.” Just because the outside world influences our sexuality, does not mean that our sexual preferences are invalid.

Some polyamorous BDSMers have very different rules about having sex with outsiders, as opposed to doing BDSM with outsiders. For example, during the time when I was considering a transition to polyamory, I myself had a couple relationships where we were sexually monogamous — yet my partners agreed that I could do BDSM with people who weren’t my partner. Those particular partners felt jealous and threatened by the idea of me having sex with another man, but they didn’t mind if I did BDSM with another man. Maybe the feelings of those partners only arose because they categorized “BDSM” and “sex” into weirdly different socially-constructed ways … but those partners’ feelings were nonetheless real, and their feelings deserved respect.

And there are also unmistakable ways that BDSM feels different from sex. There is something, bodily, that is just plain different about BDSM, as opposed to sex. I often find myself thinking of “BDSM feelings” and “sexual feelings” as flowing down two parallel channels in my head … sometimes these channels intersect, but sometimes they’re far apart. The BDSM urge strikes me as deeply different, separate, from the sex urge. It can be fun to combine BDSM and sex, but there are definitely times when I want BDSM that feel very unlike most times when I want sex.

The biggest political reason why it’s difficult to discuss this is the way in which we currently conceptualize sexuality through “orientations”: we have built a cultural “orientation model” focused on the idea that “acceptable” sexuality is “built-in”, or “innate”. Some BDSMers consider BDSM an “orientation” — and I, myself, once found that thinking of BDSM as an orientation was extremely helpful in coming to terms with my BDSM desires. But one thing I don’t like about the orientation model now is that it makes us sound like we’re apologizing. “Poor little me! It’s not my fault I’m straight! Or a domme! Whatever!” Why would any of these things be faults in the first place? Our bodies are our own, our experiences are our own, and our consent is our own to give.

Sometimes I think that we have compulsions, needs or “fetishes” that aren’t sexual, but lumping them in with sexuality is sometimes the most convenient or socially manageable way to deal with them or get those needs met. They might even physically arouse us for a variety of reasons, but that might be a side effect instead of the act’s inherent nature. Which is not to say that every act can be cleanly cleaved into “sexual” and “non-sexual” — of course not. But I think we lack a language around these needs that doesn’t use sexuality. I see a lot of groundbreaking work coming out of the asexual and disability justice communities in this regard (which is just to say that I find the folks in these groups are churning out some incredible ways to “queer” conventional dominant ideas about sexuality; not that they never have sex or whatever).

I think one answer to that is to just open up the definition of sexuality to include these things, but as someone who identifies vehemently not as “sex positive” but as “sex non-judgmental”, I know I don’t personally want all my shit to be lumped in with sexuality. It just makes me picture some sex judgmental person insisting that “oh, that’s totally sexual.”

I, Clarisse, can certainly attest that it’s common for people to have BDSM encounters that are “just” BDSM — “no sex involved”. For example — an encounter where one partner whips the other, or gets whipped, and there’s no genital contact or even discussion of genitals. (I’ve written about such encounters several times, like in my post on communication case studies.) And I’d like to stress that when I have encounters like that, they can be very satisfying without involving sex. The release — the high — I get from a heavy BDSM encounter can be its own reward.

I’ve also had BDSM encounters where I got turned on …

… but I didn’t feel turned on until later, or afterwards, or until my partner did something specific to draw out my desire. For example — I remember that in one intense BDSM encounter as a domme, I wound up the encounter and pulled away from my partner. We had both been sitting down; I stood up and took off the metal claws I’d been using to rip him up. (Secretly, the claws were banjo picks. Do-It-Yourself BDSM is awesome.)

Then I leaned over my partner to pick something up. I had thought we were pretty much done, but he seized me as I leaned over, and he pulled me close and kissed my neck, and I literally gasped in shock. My sexual desire spiked so hard … I practically melted into his arms. And yet if you’d asked me, moments before, whether I was turned on … I would have said “no”.

One way to think about it might be that sometimes, BDSM “primes” me so that I’m more receptive to sexual energy. It’s not that BDSM is exactly a sexual turn-on in itself; sometimes it is, but that’s actually surprisingly rare. Yet BDSM often … gets my blood flowing? … and seems to “open the floodgates”, so sexual hormones can storm through my body.

And just in case this wasn’t complex enough for you … on the other hand, I’ve had BDSM encounters where my partner tried to take it sexual, and I wasn’t interested. It’s almost like there’s a BDSM cycle that I often get into, and once the cycle is sufficiently advanced, I can’t easily shift out of it.

Sometimes, when I’m near the “peak” of the BDSM cycle, then being interrupted for any reason — sex, or anything else — is absolutely horrible. I’d rather be left on the edge of orgasm, burning with sexual desire, than be hurt until I almost cry. The emotion becomes a stubborn lump in my throat; becomes balled up in my chest. At times like that, it almost feels hard to breathe.

A while back, a reporter named Mac McClelland who worked in Haiti made a splash by writing an article about how she used “violent sex” to ease her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I briefly reported on the article for Feministe, but at the time, I didn’t share many of my thoughts about what she wrote. One thing I did say was that the reporter didn’t use any BDSM terminology — at least not that I spotted. She didn’t seem to conceptualize her desire for “violent sex” as a BDSM thing at all. Interestingly, a Feministe commenter named Jadey, who has experience with kink, also didn’t conceptualize the reporter’s article that way. Jadey wrote:

I don’t think she’s bad or wrong, and I don’t think her method of coping with her PTSD is bad or wrong. … [Yet] I’ve got a kink/BDSM background, but that’s not what she’s describing here. She’s talking about something far different, and I can’t understand the experience she describes with Isaac. It is … incomprehensible.

I want to stress here that I, Clarisse Thorn, have never been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. (And I’ve undergone plenty of analysis, so I’m sure that if I had PTSD, someone would have noticed by now.) And just in case it needs to be said again, I’ll also stress that I have no intention of telling anyone else how to define their own experiences. And just in case it needs to be said again, there is a big difference between consenting BDSM and abuse; here is an article I’ve written about the distinction between consenting BDSM and abuse.

But unlike Jadey, when I read the original “violent sex” article, the reporter’s description of her encounter sounded a lot like some of my preferences … indeed, it sounded like some of the BDSM encounters I’ve had. For example, the reporter writes:

“Okay,” my partner said. “I love you, okay?” I said, I know, okay. And with that he was on me, forcing my arms to my sides, then pinning them over my head, sliding a hand up under my shirt when I couldn’t stop him. The control I’d lost made my torso scream with anxiety; I cried out desperately as I kicked myself free. … When I got out from under him and started to scramble away, he simply caught me by a leg or an upper arm or my hair and dragged me back. By the time he pinned me by my neck with one forearm so I was forced to use both hands to free up space between his elbow and my windpipe, I’d largely exhausted myself.

And just like that, I’d lost. It’s what I was looking for, of course. But my body — my hard-fighting, adrenaline-drenched body — reacted by exploding into terrible panic. … I did not enjoy it in the way a person getting screwed normally would. But as it became clear that I could endure it, I started to take deeper breaths. And my mind stayed there, stayed present even when it became painful …. My body felt devastated but relieved; I’d lost, but survived. After he climbed off me, he gathered me up in his arms. I broke into a thousand pieces on his chest, sobbing so hard that my ribs felt like they were coming loose.

… Isaac pulled my hair away from my wet face, repeating over and over and over something that he probably believed but that I had to relearn. “You are so strong,” he said. “You are so strong. You are so strong.”

Sounds extremely familiar to me.

Now, it’s not like I have BDSM encounters like that all the time; indeed, experiences of that type are relatively rare for me. But the reporter’s description doesn’t sound “far different” from what I’ve experienced. Certainly not “incomprehensible”. There’s only one big difference, actually: I’ve never had such an intense BDSM experience in which my partner also had penis-in-vagina sex with me. (I’m assuming the reporter means “penis-in-vagina” sex when she talks about “getting screwed”, but I could be wrong.)

Honestly, I’m not sure why I would want to combine vaginal sex with an experience like that. Vaginal sex strikes me, personally, as kinda incidental to what I’d get out of it. But maybe I’ll try it sometime and it’ll be the greatest thing in the world; we’ll see, I guess.

Sometimes I find that I’ve still got a “BDSM versus sex” distinction to work out, although I seem to have comfortably settled into the frameworks I’ve created. One of my very first blog entries, back in 2008, was called “Casual Sex? Casual Kink?“, and I spent the whole thing musing about whether I was more or less okay with casual BDSM than I was with casual sex.

To hammer the point home, let me tell you about what happened after I broke up with a much-beloved ex-boyfriend: Mr. Inferno. It was back when I was very focused on being monogamous with my partners. Mr. Inferno broke up with me, and a month or two later I had the chance to have an overnight BDSM encounter with another man, so I took it. There was no genital contact; the whole encounter was limited to this guy giving me orders, and hurting me until I cried.

But I remember, even as I slipped into the familiar emotional cycle, that I couldn’t let go: I couldn’t let go because I felt like I was betraying Mr. Inferno. He’d broken my heart, but on some level I felt like I still belonged to him. It was wrong, wrong, wrong for me to cry in someone else’s arms. The wrongness rang through me like a bell. It was so impossible, unbearable — all I could think was how it should have been Mr. Inferno. I choked on the tears. I couldn’t lose myself in them.

Later, I mentioned to my partner that one of my ex-boyfriends (not Mr. Inferno) had trouble dealing with my BDSM desires. “Ah,” my partner said. “That explains why you had trouble letting yourself cry.” I decided to nod; to let him think he knew what was blocking me off. It seemed simpler.

In the morning, I had breakfast with my partner. We hugged and split up, and I went for a walk until I found a local creek. I sat next to the creek and I closed my eyes and I let the helpless tears slip down my cheeks.

I’d felt (and I’d known others who felt) this way after the dissolution of a sexual relationship. But I had never imagined that such a reaction of intense bodily loyalty could apply to BDSM as well as sex. I hadn’t anticipated that I’d feel such heartbreaking, visceral loss just because I let another man hurt me.

So different, and yet so the same.

* * *

This piece is included in my awesome collection, The S&M Feminist: Best Of Clarisse Thorn. You can buy The S&M Feminist for Amazon Kindle here or other ebook formats here or in paperback here.

22 Responses to “BDSM versus Sex, part 2: How Does It Feel?”

My kink drive feels predatory, like a cat chattering its teeth at a bird, not like being horny. But heavily coloured with Eros, which is a feeling tone that I find I can allow to color anything. I can be burning up with Eros and kink, and not get any arousal physically – it shows instead as things like an intense want to bite and scratch, making me gnash my teeth and curl my fingers into claws.

BDSM for me is mostly foreplay. When I start playing it’s an intense turn on. There’s something else after foreplay – where there’s still an intense, erotic space in what’s going on – but where I’m not turned on or managing my impulse to throw someone down and fuck them.

Most public playspace’s local to me are currently no genital contact, and most semi-public play spaces are not quite comfortable places to include sex as part of scenes and lots of my partners aren’t quite exhibitionist enough to want to fuck as part of a public or semi public scene. I often have to regulate my impulse to escalate from kink and S&M to sex in the early part of a night in those playspaces. And at the very end. But that period in the middle feels almost zen, but at the same time is intensely gratifying to my sense of needing kink. It’s hard to quantify/analyze.

I only weeks ago realised that What It Is That I Like is/could be categorised as BDSM. I’m still, with boyfriend’s help, finding out what that means.

I empathise with Scootah in that kink is foreplay-y for me at the moment. But I’d like it not to be. I’d like to have a night in with my partner where the end result was not going to be vaginal sex, (not that I don’t love sex) but I don’t know where ‘pure’ BDSM ‘goes’. What its ‘climax’ might be for me.

If BDSM and ‘sex’ are different things, if sex is to orgasm then kinking is to ….?

Re-reading my original question it does sound a bit like ‘how do I get off on this’ – which does sound bad!

If I do find myself thinking in a goal-oriented way, is it still something to avoid if the goal is actually post-coital cuddling and all that happy stuff? I’ve been struck reading about your experiences almost more by how you describe the aftermaths of scenes than the idea of scenes themselves. I just want to get to a point where my partner knows for sure that he’s done a good job and it’s hugs time, without having to safeword – or indulge in plain ol’ sex.

Yeah, aftercare is definitely important. And that relationship, where your partner knows he’s done good and it’s hugs time — that’s definitely possible. I’ve thought about writing about aftercare, but haven’t yet. I mentioned it, and linked to a resource, in my post on body chemistry. I think I also talked about it a little bit in the subspace post. Maybe those will be a little helpful, if you haven’t read them already.

Well I’m not the BDSM educator here, and Clarisse can say “Shut up, machina!” but I don’t think goals are a bad idea. For example, I had a girlfriend that showed me some pictures of her mid-scene and that was really helpful as a goal. I like other sorts of goals, “I’ve taken 100 cane strokes, I’d like to get to 200″, “I want to cry myself out”, “I want to get incoherent”, etc. Of course, these all rely on you having a good idea of what you want. Maybe you’re just feeling around at the moment, in which I’d say that being a lot more willing to safeword would be a good idea.

@Machina – I generally don’t enjoy things like ‘I’d like to do 200 strokes’ or ‘I’d like to do 200 needles’ – sometimes as an art project or something, I’ll set a defined goal to work through a temporary or permanent body mod with a bottom who wants an 80 piercing corset or something. But for me – that’s a very different headspace than most S&M in my experience. It’s certainly not where the rush is for me. Although it is where some of the better photos come from…

I think there’s always some kind of plan or goal. It’s usually not clearly defined or stated, although maybe it would be better if it was. It’s a lot like the goal when someone has sex or gets intoxicated. I want to experience something pleasant/intense/distracting/entertaining because I enjoy feeling pleasure/intensity/distraction/entertainment or because it takes my mind away from some other negative thing that’s going on.

I go into scenes thinking ‘This is going to feel amazing’ or ‘this is going to be so much fun’ or ‘god I’ve needed to feel this’ or ‘this will totally take my mind off of work’. My ‘plan’ for most scenes is to find that certain ineffable something that I only get from kink.

I love the aftercare – the closeness and the intensity and the intimacy. I love the new partner energy and feeling the walls drop away when two people share something that lets you disconnect for a while from anxiety and propriety and just enjoy each other honestly. And that’s part of the ineffable something that I get from kink. But the actual physicality of the scene is a huge part of it for me as well.

Thanks guys, I’m really glad to be having this discussion – the wonders of the interwebs…

Machina – :) What you describe, having a point to reach in terms of endurance or experience – is just what I was looking for! I haven’t actually needed to safeword yet, as he’s very good at reading my random noises. Maybe a more structured scene would be the way forward – interrogation or something I can control easily – but not necessarily anything in the order of hundreds!

Scootah, I like the tension and, sometimes, apprehension added with goals, that can be fun to work with. I think it’s also a lot easier to go into something with more diffuse goals once you’ve already reached something more concrete in the past.

Elisabeth, reading back, I was a bit presumptuous regarding safewords, I’m sorry about that. But I’m happy to help aside from that. I think a structured scene can be helpful, I was actually going to suggest interrogation… but because it would give your partner lots of opportunities to monitor you :P

I’ve been thinking over the stuff in the OP and comments for a bit, trying to sort out where I fit with all of this.

I think I almost (but not quite) feel the opposite of what Scootah said, about “BDSM for me is mostly foreplay”. In some ways the arc he describes is familiar, but I certainly couldn’t interpret it the way he does.

For me, sex is part of the arc of BDSM, it’s not an aim or the outcome or result of BDSM taking place. In my usual way of doing things, “sex” tends to come relatively early on, and then after it there’s other stuff as well – or it takes place as a “warm-fuzzy BDSM” play on its own (sex without any element of BDSM, for me doesn’t work, in that sense the whole of BDSM put together does form a fetish in the technical sense of the word, even though I don’t need any individual piece).

It’s difficult for me to argue that I see sex as foreplay precisely, for BDSM, again because it doesn’t usually come at the start to “get things warmed up”, but it certainly isn’t in any way a culmination thing either, except in my masturbation fantasies (where, clearly, the objective is orgasm) – and even there, often the BDSM stands alone without overt sexual content.

The discussion about “if sex is to orgasm then kinking is to ….?” I think is a really interesting question (so thanks to Elisabeth for introducing it).

To me, it looks from the outside as though the “normal” arc of sex is something like foreplay – sex – orgasm – post-orgasmic bliss. The pay-off isn’t necessarily the orgasm itself, but the feelings that come after it as well (oxytocin and seratonin, IIRC). I know that a big part of the pay-off for BDSM is that “post-orgasmic” feeling at the end of it, which comes regardless of being top or bottom, and regardless of whether actual sex or orgasm was involved. I don’t know for sure which brain chemicals are involved in that (oxytocin and endorphins at least, I imagine).

The rest is kind of curious. I wrote a while back that for me, BDSM is a lot about the emotions expressed and experienced: “concepts and ideas that involve desperation, fear, pain, helplessness, terror, humiliation, anxiety, denial, and so on, are right alongside lust, passion, need, tenderness and warmth for me as erotic responses in a partner.” So it makes sense that, even though the pleasure of SM particularly is sited in the body (as opposed to being purely in the mind) there is a large element of mental state as well – the distinction between “good” and “bad” pain, and how sometimes the context makes a punishment spanking feel bad but a play spanking feel awesome, for example.

So the way I’m thinking is that the “orgasm” phase of BDSM is when you reach the emotional state goal and hold it. For that reason, I think that a BDSM climax can last a very long time – as long as the bodies and minds of the participants can maintain that level of “embodied-emotional” climax, in fact. It’s then followed by a release (which is like the slump after orgasm, not like the release of orgasm itself) and “post-climax bliss”. I kind of recognise this idea of the embodied-emotion climax phase in the OP when Clarisse talks about the reporter and compares it to her own experiences – although I would suggest that for me it doesn’t feel quite the same as she describes, it seems like the same type of thing being described (and I’m guessing different people feel differently about how to describe their own orgasms, too).

But the foreplay for that is also BDSM, although maybe different elements or types of it. It may be that bondage sets a mood or introduces a seed of whatever emotion you’re after, and then the main scene while the bottom is still bound, uses other techniques to build on that; or it may be that increasing levels of restriction and bondage are what are used to build towards a climax. Equally, a spanking can be a warm-up for a hard SM scene, or it can be a part of the climax of a discipline or D/s scene, so I think the distinction between foreplay and “the main event” leading up to a climax, is very muddied.

Of course, not every BDSM scene results in a massive emotion-overload climax , but equally, not every bout of sex results in a mind-blowing orgasm either, and there are lots of satisfying mini-climaxes in the embodied-emotional panoply that provide pay-off for lighter BDSM, and often are a part of the build-up when there’s a big climax aimed for as well.

This seems to tie into the sorts of goals being discussed above, in that most of them describe the sort of embodied-emotional state that’s being envisioned as the climax (the different one is the endurance-test goal, but even there, there’s an emotional pay-off that comes from counting them down to “I did it!”)

Wooo! Long post, glad I read!
Thanks for saying I asked something interesting, for a first-time commenter and relative BDSM virgin it’s nice to know I can still stir things up a bit.

Once again I find myself very much empathising with Snowdrop’s experience. It’s great to know that despite everyone’s preferences being different, that there is so much overlap to relate to. I think your description of a state of being, rather than the sneeze-like pleasure of orgasm, is both helpful for me and very attractive as something to aim for (jeez, more goals!)

With that in mind I don’t think that machina’s more endurance-like suggestions are so far away from scootah’s search for a good place to escape to and be; when you get to 150 out of 200, I would think you’re pretty tripping.

The concept of foreplay as a thing – I think here it’s good to look back at Clarisse’s OP and remember that kink and sex can be in completely different headspaces 2 seconds apart. I think a lot of it depends as well on your partner, and what their ‘goal’ or desire or motivations are, and balancing that with yours. Inevitably one comes before the other (no pun intended.)

Hmm, well, the “goal” thing — I guess I was thinking of trying to encourage people to avoid the “standard” goals, because those can all-too-often turn into something like “If I don’t have an orgasm or give my partner an orgasm then I’m a failure.” And that’s no good.

But in-the-moment, smaller goals totally make sense to me — I’ve done things like that. I mentioned a few in my post on predicament bondage. I sometimes think that the concept of “predicament bondage” really is a cornerstone of BDSM.

Here I am again, moments after saying I didn’t have time to read the comments on another post of yours… Well at least I read them on this one!

It’s interesting to hear that so many people do genuinely feel BDSM and sex to be different (if related) things. I say that because to me, a submissive guy, submission is 100% sexual. Fantasising about scenarios involving my submission leads to erections and (with the help of manual stimulation) orgasms — simple as that really! (Mind you, I usually don’t find actual PIV sex to be arousing at all, so I suppose I don’t really have a solid “reference point” to compare with.)

Having said that, one possible differentiator comes to mind: subspace. This is something I’ve never actually experienced, but I really want to, and I’ve felt myself gravitating toward it a few times while exploring certain fantasies in my mind. I envisage it being a trance-like state in which the rational part of my mind is eclipsed completely for minutes or hours on end; I suspect that there’s no vanilla equivalent. Nevertheless I know that for me, subspace will be a *sexual* trance — an altered state of mind that I expect will involve a kind of sexual arousal that is enjoyable in its own right, without the urge for orgasm.

About Clarisse

On the other hand, my latest book is about the history, stereotypes, and culture of BDSM:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, and bookstores. Now I live in San Francisco, and I make my living with content strategy and user research.